Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Online Edition Review: Long Name, Still Great Game…and Online Play Too!

Pros:
The best version of Street Fighter 3
Online play works very well

Cons:
Can be too tough for amateurs
Gill…Do I need to expain?

How can I sum up the long running history of Capcom’s Street Fighter series? Start with a basic game, update it a few months later and charge full price, update it again with a longer name and charge full price, update it again with an even longer name and charge full price, etc… I think you get the point. After they rape you for your money for a couple of years then they’ll start the process all over with a new title. Mainly this was Street Fighter 2 through the ’90s.

Late in the same decade, Capcom decided that it was time to count to three. Street Fighter 3 was unleashed and some fans took the reception well. The rest said “What the fuck” and went back to the previous game. Part of their reasons was the lack of familiar characters. The other was the tougher difficulty. Street Fighter 3 was the toughest and the most technical of all the games. Good news for us is that Capcom gave fans the best of the Street Fighter 3 games…Third Strike!

Now on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation 3, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Online Edition (another long name with a full downloadable price) brings back the classic formula that we all know and love in the fighting game genre. Time for some more quarter circle and charge back and forth d-pad movements while pressing punch and kick buttons. Add in a few super moves and counters and what you have is one of the most technical fighting games of all time in glorious 2D. The best part about this game is online multiplayer making for some great matchups or like most people an embarrassing mismatch.

The game as a whole is an exact port of the arcade classic except this time Capcom has decided to enhance the game slightly. One of those enhancements comes in the graphical arena where you can choose the original look or choose a more crisp refinement. You can also change the presentation from the original 4:3 to widescreen or even an arcade cabinet. While most people will go right to the widescreen presentation, I would recommend against it. On my big screen the widescreen look just blows up the screen distorting everything. Just stick to the 4:3 or arcade cabinet. Even in these ratios Capcom uses the full screen with progress awards for unlocking achievements as well as other content.

For those of you that are new to Street Fighter 3 or veterans of other variations of the series I strongly suggest boning up on your skills because this game will kick your ass. Have you noticed how many times I’ve said how technical this game is? I’m really not kidding. Counters, reversals, when to block supers, Gill…enough said. Your Street Fighter 2 or even Street Fighter 4 skills will not work here. Was M. Bison too tough for you to beat? Are you a Ryu’s Hadoken spammer? If you answered yes to any of those questions, and your Street Fighter 2 skills are all you have to offer, then you might find yourself in bigger trouble in more than just the arcade mode. You might also want to add the online arena as well. If you need some much needed practice I would suggest the training mode.

Any diehard Street Fighter fan is very critical on a game’s performance more than anything else. Well I’m here to tell you that both online and offline gameplay run very smooth with almost no sign of lag. Even me with a less than superior internet signal lately didn’t hurt me online with the many competitors. As for my success rate…we’ll just leave it at 50/50.

Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Online Edition sure is long in name, but there’s plenty of features, along with online play to keep you busy for quite awhile. There’s enough flavor to have a want to play this game along with the multitude of other fighting games on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 especially with plenty of Street Fighter games available. Now let’s just hope that Capcom doesn’t release a new updated edition a few months later like what they did with another popular fighting franchise.